A Profile - Eugene Kohn, Maestro in Residence

Sure, “Palisades’ Got Talent,” and plenty of it. But more
than a few neighbors wondered where Eugene Kohn had
been hiding his when, at a Palisades Library benefit in October
2010, he sat at a piano accompanying the tenor Giuseppe
Filianoti who was fresh from a recent production of Offenbach’s
"Contes d’Hoffmann" at the Metropolitan Opera, and
nearly blew the roof off the Community Center.

For many Palisadians, the men’s collaboration on Tosti’s
“L’alba separa dalla luce l’ombra” was their introduction to
the prodigious musical gifts of Eugene, who has called Hey
Hoe Woods Road home since 2008. But for more than 40
years, opera lovers have known him as an orchestra conductor
as well as an accompanist, coach and adviser to acclaimed
performers like Plácido Domingo and Andrea Bocelli.

“I have my share of operatic history that I feel very lucky to
have participated in,” Eugene said on a recent Sunday as he
prepared to dissect Massenet’s “Thaïs” with Domingo at his
studio in the Ansonia at 74th and Broadway.

Lured to Palisades by memories of assisting the conductor
Thomas Schippers in the early ‘70s on Ludlow Lane, Eugene
has since nestled into an airy farmhouse where a century-old
Bechstein grand piano, its walnut art-case inlaid with mahogany
ornamentation, holds court in a music room. There amid
the grass and woods, friends like the soprano Angela Gheorghiu
have sought sanctuary from the maddening crowds.
When he’s not traveling, Eugene pursues his other passion,
flipping houses, and is currently renovating his second in the
hamlet, transforming a small contemporary in Snedens Landing
into a large farmhouse.

“I had discovered over the last eight years that I really loved
building,” he said. “It offers me something that music doesn’t
because once the notes are gone in a performance, there’s nothing
left except press reviews or maybe a recording. Whereas
when you build something, you can walk on it and lean against
it and touch it, and it stays there forever. It gives me a lot of
satisfaction. And I’ve found that coordinating projects with
carpenters and electricians and plumbers, and bringing them
together in a unified direction, is similar to conducting an orchestra.”

Reared on the upper West Side in Manhattan and in Whitestone,
Queens, Eugene was five years old when he began to
pick out the tunes his mother played on the family piano. He
eventually entered the preparatory division of the Manhattan
School of Music and by fourteen was accompanying singers.
“It was a difficult period in my parents’ marriage and as an
escape, I went into the opera world,” he recalled. At fifteen, he
was introduced to Fausto Cleva, a conductor at the Met, and
soon began to play for the great soprano Renata Tebaldi during
her coaching sessions. “So early on I had these gorgeous
sounds in my ear,” he said.

It was the bass-baritone George London who recommended
Eugene to the legendary Maria Callas, who’d grown weary,
she told London, “of these old fogeys always telling me what
to do.” To which he replied, “Eugene is so young that he’s not
going to tell you anything. He’ll just do what you say.” She
liked him for precisely that reason. “Unfortunately, I didn’t
have enough brains at the time to learn as much from her as
I could have,” he said. “Nor was I able to help her vocally
as much as I would have if she’d come across my path now.
I regret that.”

So, too, with Tebaldi, the singer he loved the most. Still, “I
began to realize that instead of beating myself up over that,
these women didn’t need to be helped,” he said. “They had
the careers that the universe meant them to have, and I feel
lucky to have been a part of them. Nobody would have been
able to change that destiny.”

In turn, Callas and Tebaldi — their infamous rivalry more
record-company hype than reality — helped Eugene, he recounted,
by “giving me confidence and teaching me about
how vocal sounds energized to intensify the musical communication.”
This contributed to the development of Eugene’s
own “sound ideal” as a conductor, and he frequently
asks orchestral musicians to express the timbre of the human
voice through their instruments.

As an accompanist to Callas, Eugene found himself immortalized
as the character Manny in Terrence McNally’s play
Master Class, a fictionalized account of the sessions Callas
gave at the Juilliard School in 1971-72. “I think that it’s a
wonderful theater piece, but it takes a lot of liberties with
the personality of Maria Callas,” he said. “It portrays her as
being much more open about her fears and insecurities in
public than she ever was. She was much more guarded than
that.”

He also plays himself in Franco Zeffirelli’s 2002 film Callas
Forever, with Fanny Ardant and Jeremy Irons. And those who
missed his local performance with Filianoti can find a video of
the men in concert at YouTube.com.

Eugene started conducting in 1975 at the urging of Luciano
Pavarotti and made his Metropolitan Opera debut in 1980,
where he worked for nearly seven years before moving into
principal and guest positions for the Bonn Opera, the Puerto
Rico Symphony, Teatro Liceu de Barcelona, Deutsche Opera
Berlin and the Washington National Opera.

In the early ‘80s he began working with Domingo, whom he’d
known for years, conducting the orchestra for many of the
tenor’s concert performances and working with him offstage
on diction and interpretation. “He’s also a conductor, and
I’ve learned a tremendous amount from him,” Eugene said.
“I think he’s one of the greatest opera singers ever, and I feel
lucky to have his trust and loyalty.”

His association with Bocelli began in 2007, after an introduction
years earlier by Pavarotti. (Eugene was visiting Bocelli’s
home on the Tuscan coast in January of this year when the
Costa Concordia ship capsized nearby.) “He’s a tremendous
musician and a wonderful voice and a wonderful human being,
and I feel very enriched to work with him,” he said.

It’s a mutual admiration society. “Eugene is a great musician
as well as being a man who lives for music, almost more than
me,” Bocelli said in a recent interview in Northern Virginia
magazine. “It is always a wonderful thing to work with people
who still have a childish enthusiasm toward the things they
do.”

This year Eugene will conduct the orchestra on Bocelli’s
American tour as well as travel with him to Beijing and Bahrain.
He’ll also lead the Washington National Opera Orchestra
in the Plácido Domingo Celebrity Series concert with Gheorghiu
on March 3, and direct Verdi’s Don Carlo, with Filianoti
in the title role, at Ópera Perú in Lima in May.

Between engagements, Eugene, a proud father of three adult
children, will return to Palisades, where Parker, his ebullient
yellow Lab, never tires of greeting him, and where a pot of
soup can almost always be found simmering on the stove.
“I love living in Palisades, and I try to help the community a
little bit whenever I can,” Eugene said before asking, “Can
you find out if anybody has any good soup recipes they’d like
to share?”